2/15/2011 @ 9:41AM39,908 views

Get Football Out Of Our Universities

(In which I take on the football-industrial complex, and get myself in trouble) The Super Bowl is over, finally. The college football* season is over too. Now we can be spared the breathless, hyperbolic stories about football for a few months, at least until next season. The culture of football in American universities is completely out of control. It is undermining our education system and hurting our competitiveness in technology, science, and engineering. If we keep it up, the U.S. will eventually be little more than the big, dumb jock on the world stage—good for entertainment on the weekend, but not taken seriously otherwise.

Too harsh? I don’t think so. I think we need to eliminate football entirely from our universities if we want to maintain our pre-eminent position as the world’s scientific and technological leader.

Why do we need to get football out of our universities? I’ve watched over the years as football has taken an ever-more prominent role in our high schools and colleges, as football coaches have been paid ever-higher salaries, and as football staffs and stadiums have been super-sized. All of this effort goes to the care and feeding of a very small number of (exclusively) male students, most of whom get a poor education and almost none of whom succeed as professional players. Our universities are providing a free training ground for the super-wealthy owners of professional football teams, while getting little in return.

This has got to stop. The core mission of our universities is to educate our students, not to entertain them with big-time sports events. Our political leaders, and all too often our university presidents, seem to have lost sight of this fact.

So I was very pleasantly surprised when President Obama, in his State of the Union speech on January 25, put in a plea for science over football:

“We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair.”

Wow, not bad! Of course, as a politician he has to support football, so he argues only that the science fair deserves equal footing with football. (Even that is pretty radical for a politician.) I’ll go a big step further: the winner of the science fair deserves far more praise and celebration than any winner of any football game. If football disappeared, we could get our entertainment from another sport, as we do every year after the football season ends. But if we stop producing scientists, other countries will make the discoveries that solve the technological, medical, and engineering problems of the future, and that form the basis for great civilizations.

Now that I’ve gotten myself in trouble with football fans (and there are many of them), let me get myself in even more trouble, with an example from my own university.

At the University of Maryland last year, the football coach fell out of favor with the athletic director, who wanted to replace him. (This despite the fact that the coach was very successful, with an overall winning record.) The problem was, he had one more year to go in his contract, and the university would have to pay him a cool $2 million if they fired him. U. Maryland doesn’t exactly have money to burn: for three years running, it has imposed furloughs on all employees and prohibited all raises, including cost-of-living increases. So you’d think that blowing $2 million to pay a coach to sit on the sidelines, and paying who-knows-how-much to hire a new coach, would be out of the question.

What a bad move. That $2 million should have been spent on, well, how about educating the students? (And don’t get me started on football coaches’ salaries – they often make 3-5 times more than their own presidents.)

Do we want our universities to be known for their football teams? Or do we want them to be known as educational powerhouses? Apparently, the U. Maryland administration is more interested in building a better football team. Not surprisingly, many of the professors disagree. I can only hope that the students would side with the professors, but I honestly don’t know.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

To better understand college sports finances, see the press release, “Knight Commission Calls for College Sports Reform, Recommends Public Transparency of Finances and New Financial Incentives,” at http://www.knightcommission.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=583 . In a nutshell, this past June, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics issued a report that revealed huge disparities between spending on athletics and academics and called for financial reforms in college sports. The report, “Restoring the Balance: Dollars, Values, and the Future of College Sports,” can be accessed via a link provided at the referenced press release.

I have a B.A. from Maryland and an M.A. from Auburn. Both in Communication Studies. I can say first hand that at both schools, I had a rigorous course load.

I have a few general comments here. You are correlating football to not having enough funding for the math and sciences and therefore not producing enough scientists. I don’t think if we get rid of football, universities would produce a signifigant more amount of scientists. Football is a distraction, but so is Facebook, Halo, Black Ops etc. So is football causing us not to have enough scientists or is it distration from academics in general?

Also, my talent was in the liberal arts and I teach rhetoric/public speaking(I think Aristotle and the Sophists would argue the importance of this in our society). Your talent is in Computer Science, so your view will always be biased towards the sciences. Many of us don’t have the natural talent to become scientists or engineers, does that mean students who get degrees in something they are naturally good at should be faulted?

You credited Barack Obama’s quote about the science fair. Guess what, Barack is not a scientist, he has a political science degree and a law degree.

Maybe he should have said we should celebrate the winner of the science fair and the winner of the student who submitted the best english paper at the academic conference.

Football is an opportunity for all young males to get to college. Scholarships help those who can’t get into college through education. It is sad to realize the truth but reality is something we all must face. Poverty is real in this country and those who are denied an entry to colleges through education can find a way through rigous phyiscal activity

Mr. Stephen Salzburg brings up a great argument about university’s and their football teams. With great supporting facts, in how football clouds the main goal for students going to college after high school. From a seniors perspective my main goal is to create a better opportunity for a greater future and sports is not one of the benefactors that decides what college to go to.

Salzburg you bring up a lot of debates about major colleges. In witch their academic accomplishments have detoured over time. As you mentioned “The core mission of our universities is to educate our students, not to entertain them with big-time sports events. Our political leaders, and all too often our university presidents, seem to have lost sight of this fact” (Stephen Salzburg). The fact that universities are chosen based upon sports teams instead of the math department or science department.

Many people disagree with how much coaches are being paid over well qualified teachers. Salzburg states in his article. “The problem was he had one more year to go in his contract, and the university would have to pay him a cool $2 million if they fired him” (Stephen Salzburg). I would have to agree with most of the statements in this article. Especially in California are such schools as the University of California, there are a great deal of people that fallow the school only based upon their football team. I believe that sports are in spite of my argument good for the colleges. If some one likes specific college footballs team the chances of them attending the school is a lot higher then someone who doesn’t know much about the school.

Schools not only in the United States, but all over the world are focusing on education as seen in Salzburg’s article. “Meanwhile, nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world. And so they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science. They’re investing in research and new technologies. Just recently, China became the home to the world’s largest private solar research facility, and the world’s fastest computer So, yes, the world has changed. The competition for jobs is real. But this shouldn’t discourage us. It should challenge us. …. We’re the home to the world’s best colleges and universities, where more students come to study than any place on Earth.” (Stephen Salazar quotes President Obama). President Obama makes it clear to us how the rest of the world is starting to advance in technology and in their economy. In conclusion their must be a balance to the sports and schooling colleges provide for their students and their community. And in the balance we could prosper. But for now college sports still are part of the American way. But as an American citizen I look for the American dream. And we will do what ever we have to do to find it.

I believe Steven Salzberg is crazy. As a football player, it is easy to explain why. Football is a major reason why people chose to go to a college. I know a lot of my older siblings are very smart and got into a lot of schools. When it came down time to decide which school to go to, my brothers obviously chose a school where they could go to football games and enjoy themselves. College football is not only for the students, but also for fans all over the world. Little kids who grow up playing football look at these athletes as role models and aspire to be in their position one day. With out college football, there would be no more NFL, which is some people’s entire life. Football is “The Great American Sport” because it is not played anywhere else in the world. Salzberg claims that soccer is something better than football. Why, because more countries play it? His arguments are weak, at best. Football is very high revenue for the colleges and helps them with financial issues they may have. A recent pole showed the profit made off of teams who went to a bowl game. Texas made over 120 million dollars. That could help fund many things: such as Steven’s science. Lets face it, football as always and will always be a major role in colleges. Students look forward to Saturday nights in order to go out to the stadium and cheer on their school. No one loves more than to trash talk another school because their school’s football team beat theirs or vice-versa. I earned a scholarship to a very academically sophisticated school, which I would not have been admitted to with grades alone. I look at it like this; I have put so much time and effort into the game, that it is sort of a job to me. I do not get paid because I am only in high school and getting a scholarship is my reward for all my time and effort. What would be the point to play the sport if there was no fun in it? Receiving a call from a college coach and having him tell you that you have a scholarship offer is the most fun any athlete can ever dream of. If this anti-sport lover wants to abolish football, why not just cancel every sporting program? Face it; football is the most watched sport in college, next to basketball. It would be absolutely absurd to just can an entire sport from existence, when it has brought so much positive to our country. People come together to watch and participate in these games. Friendships that last a lifetime are erected from this game. I believe that Salzberg tried to play football when he was younger and was probably really bad at it so therefore thinks that no one should get a free education for football. He is just blatantly wrong.

i have no idea why you believe that in removing college football would help out the schools. foothill is americas sport, colleges make a lot of money with just football alone, with all of their sponsors. another thing, most students’s wouldn’t be able to afford to go to a good college if it wasn’t for football, their are so many scholorships given out each year to several students just because of their skills in football.

On February 21, I wrote, “In his 2000 book, Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education, Murray Sperber argues that schools are substituting a party-like, “beer and circus” social environment for a meaningful education—an environment that serves to keep students happy, to marginalize faculty, and to maintain on ongoing flow of evermore tuition dollars. The New York Times Book Review read: ‘It is hard to read Sperber’s book without having a sinking feeling about the future of American culture. He has managed to document our national decline in painstaking detail.’ We can have the same sinking feeling after reading Academically Adrift wherein the authors provide data to back their observation: “Growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communications are exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent.” This observation certainly supports Sperber’s earlier condemnation of higher education.”

To be sure, Murray Sperber is not the only academic to level criticism at the current state of higher education in America. Although authors Richard Arum and Josipa Roska do not reference Sperber in their book, Academically Adrift, they do quote Derek Bok on several occasions.

Bok, the 300th Anniversary University Professor and former President, Harvard University, used much kinder and gentler language in making many of the same points that were made by Sperber in Beer and Circus. See Bok’s 2003 book, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education and his 2006 book, Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More.

And there is a good reason why Robert Zemsky, a long-time leading voice for higher education, wrote his 2009 book, Making Reform Work: The Case for Transforming Higher Education, a compelling account of what needs changing in America’s system of higher education.

I can see valid points in your argument and can almost agree with you on the whole make it a business plan. I have a couple of questions for you?

1. There is no way to know that a donor who donates to football instead of the university would give money to the university if there wasn’t a football team is there?

2. What say you then to a University such as Tennessee where the athletic department is self supporting and donates 12 million in revenue to the University for the past several years? That money wouldn’t necessarily be there and UT would be much more financial trouble than it is now.

3. What about other sports such as basketball? If no football what would you do with them?

4. Finally, if it did become a separate entity and paid university for licenses, would the athletes be college students like they are now? would they be paid?

5. BONUS: Do you see any benefit to universities that football could bring? Such as bringing students into school to get a degree that normally would consider community college instead if football wasn’t there?

I can see where the author is coming from and also think that he made some good points. It is ridiculous that the University of Maryland wasted $2 million dollars just to pay off a coach. That is a large sum of money and could have been used towards so many other things that would have been 100 times more productive. I hate to see money wasted like that when there are so many problems in our economy that need to be taken care of. However, i would not recommend taking football out of universities completely. I think a better solution would be to put more logical and smart people in charge of the spending that goes towards football teams and coaches.

One last question, if it was really that financially draining to a university to continue football (as i assume your implicating saying only 17 schools make a profit which is fact based on link you provided above) why would they not just drop it? Cal dropped baseball recently because of this.